fyi:
- https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp lets you download videos (from youtube and also hundreds of other sites)
- for desktop, https://mpv.io/ is free and lets you watch youtube (or any other video) at even more and faster speeds than youtube premium does, among many other features
- for android, https://newpipe.net/ lets you play youtube in the background (and download videos, and block ads, …)
- https://ublockorigin.com/ blocks ads everywhere (and yes it does still work on youtube, at least in firefox anyway)
I feel like whatever alternative ways of consuming YouTube videos there are are only because the overlords haven’t considered them sufficiently problematic. yt-dlp recently had to choose to delegate javascript challenges to stuff like deno.
YouTube really recently stepped up their efforts to detect and circumvent adblockers. Before last year, there was no such thing as an adblock error message. Now, anything but uBlock will likely trigger it.
Part of this is Google’s step to gain more control over the browser ecosystem and lock down the ability to even use adblockers.
I think it’s both a matter of these solutions not being sufficiently problematic, while also being unfeasible to actually fix.